World Development Report: Why no mention of Paris?

The World Bank report offers some welcome suggestions on reforming institutions to address conflict, but it is strange that it fails to mention the Paris agenda on aid effectiveness

A newborn baby is held by her father outside a church in a small village outside Quelimane, Mozambique. The country has improved its primary completion rates since civil war ended. Photograph: Getty/Graeme Robertson

The World Bank has published its annual World Development Report and, as usual, it is a good read. This year its focus is on insecurity, conflict and fragility. It aims to build the evidence linking development, the bank's primary area of expertise, and insecurity, one of the biggest constraints on progress.

The first things you can expect from a report like this are some new era-defining stats. So we get this: "One-and-a-half billion people live in areas affected by fragility, conflict or large-scale, organised criminal violence, and no low-income fragile or conflict-affected country has yet to achieve a single UN millennium development goal."

The first part of the report shares a lot of helpful evidence for something that should be obvious – conflict is one of the biggest enemies of development. Anyone Ivorian would be able to thoroughly back that assessment at the moment as they watch the development gains of recent years being put at risk by the present violence.

To pick from one of the many statistics: "Mozambique more than tripled its primary [school] completion rate in just eight years, from 14% in 1999 [seven years after the fighting ended] to 46% in 2007."

So far, so obvious. What does the World Bank think should be done? It has one clear and compelling answer: Make institutions more legitimate. Legitimate institutions are what the report cleverly describes as a country's "immune system" against conflict.

The report turns out to be one more example of how "institutions" have finally made it to the very top of the development hierarchy, trumping "good policy" as the latest key to development progress. The report is impressive in scope, seeking to reassess an international order built in the wake of two world wars and finding it wanting for the new reality of conflict today, with its complex, repeated and inter-related forms of violence.

Commendably, it mentions the big issues, like the drugs trade and international channels of corruption, that development experts often prefer to leave to others. It emphasises the importance of improved data collection to track stolen money. But on drugs it is weaker, mustering only the following recommendation: "Exploring the costs and benefits of different combinations of demand and supply-side measures would be a first step to underpinning more decisive demand-side actions." Hmmm.

Being the World Bank, there is not the slightest hint that western powers could be at fault for any of the violence and conflict in the world. It might have been nice to acknowledge that violence is not a developing world phenomenon, by adding a few examples of western problems.

The style of the report is humble, which is all the rage in development nowadays. It is an attitude taking some time to filter down to country managers, though, where anecdotal tales of arrogant westerners insisting on rapid change along Washington Consensus lines are still all too common. But at least there is change at the top.

One thing I particularly liked was the emphasis on job creation because it is unemployment that is the major driver behind young people joining rebel groups or criminal gangs (according to the surveys quoted). Again, it's common sense, but it's always useful to have it written down. Jobless growth is not good enough.

First prize for most glaring omission is shared between Colombo and Paris. The major story in internal armed conflict recently, the crushing of the Tamil uprising in Sri Lanka, gets not one mention in the whole report. I expect there are complicated politics behind this silence.

But there is no such excuse for the failure to mention the Paris agenda on aid effectiveness. Fundamental to the legitimacy of institutions is where their money comes from. So the report is right to focus on the donor-recipient relationship, which muddies the supposed accountability links between citizen and government. It is good that this link (a particular beef of mine) is being recognised in such an important report.

But to engage in a long list of (very welcome) suggestions for how international agencies should reform without mentioning the major international initiative seeking to achieve such reform is strange. While calling for donors to work better together, the World Bank is in danger of looking like it prefers to go it alone, setting up a new group of "WDR principles".

What about the future? The WDR recognises that climate change and increased competition for natural resources are likely to heighten the risk of conflict in the years to come. And there are some very useful pointers as to what makes for a potentially more peaceful future.

One that particularly hit me was this: "Some states have tried to maintain stability through coercion and patronage networks, but those with high levels of corruption and human rights abuses increase their risks of violence breaking out in the future." Or in layman's terms, you need to deal with the causes of the problem. The causes are usually linked to poverty and injustice, as a later graphic makes clear.

That is also one of the conclusions (obviously) of a separate initiative that is worth looking at. The Global Peace Index ranks countries according to how peaceful they are, and while the methodology behind it can be criticised (as any index can) it adds important evidence to the debate about which policies really do contribute to peace.